Into the Wardrobe

I'm not sure if this has been posted before and I'm terribly sorry if it has! But, can anyone explain to me what the reasoning behind the time difference in our world and Narnia is?Is it Christian symbology in the way that to be in Jesus' presence is timeless?

I think that you'll find that sometimes there is reasoning behind the events in Lewis' stories about Narnia, and sometimes the only reason is to facilitate belief in another aspect of the story.
That's one of the things that Tolkien disliked about the CON; it's a hodge-podge of mythical creatures and ideas.

There is a time difference so that the children could remain in Narnia for long periods of time without being missed in their own world, and so that they could come back in the second book and find that hundreds of years had passed. Simply that and nothing more, IMHO.

Although versed in Classical and Medieval literature, Lewis seems to make allusions to physics after Einstein, enough that he must have had familiarity with the concepts. He was a remarkably widely read man. He clearly respected science per se. As one fictional example, his character William Hingest, described as the only "real scientist" at Bracton College, was the only man or woman valiant enough to stand up and leave the NICE in That Hideous Strength. Some of the explanations Oyarsa and the Seroni give to Ransom in OOSP about the nature of the eldila, and the praises of God the Oyarsas and the three humans sing at the end of Perelanda echo an Einsteinian universe, too IMO. He also builds on some of these ideas, I think, in Mere Christianity, in showing how our experience of this reality can't be used to limit God's eternal existence outside of time and space - as in prayer, for example. (I think that's in the last chapter of MC.)


Lewis challenged empiricism and positivism in various ways in his books. For example, Frost in THS seems to be a type of positivist. Although I'm a biologist, not a physicist, it seems like the advance of physics in the 20th Century seems to have helped knock empiricism down a few notches by helping to show that we can't ever be an objective observer somehow outside our experience of reality. No one can escape the need for faith; we can't ever arrive at all truth by scientific measurement alone; there's always a context we're within as finite creatures.

I finally got around to reading The Discarded Image not too long ago - Lewis text for a course he taught that looked at changes in worldview between the medieval and modern world - and I thought he made these kinds of points quite strongly in that book, about all human perspectives being relative, even though some truth is still known. In fact, it even made me wonder if he had read Thomas Kuhn's famous book about Scientific Revolutions (published 1962) and incorporated some insights from Kuhn, or if they were conclusions he had reached independently. (Maybe some of both.)


In any case, I think Lewis liked to have plot elements that showed that our time and our experience is not absolute, but relative to other things, including some that we can't even imagine, and ultimately to God. I loved how that was worked into TNC in so many ways - a lifetime of experience on Narnia had passed in less than 5 minutes on Earth in TLWW; the wood between the worlds in The Magician's Nephew, etc. Many science fiction writers have used variable timelines to all sorts of ends since Einstein made it plausible that time is not passing at the same speed in different places.

Of course, it did also make it possible to resolve some plot problems, like if 4 children had disappeared from a professor's house and not returned! I had read also - like one of the comments above - that Tolkien didn't like this. The world of LOTR has no connection with our world today other than through the line of humanity - but I suspect Lewis had a point he wanted to make rather than just using the different time and space as a plot shortcut.

Although more time usually passed in Narnia compared to our world there was an exception to this in TLB. After seeing the Friends of Narnia in his vision only a few seconds passed for Tirian, whereas back in our world more than a week had gone by.

I wonder if this had something to do with the Narnian world nearing the end of it's existance.